The primary colours and three-dimensional font (100% PER MONTH) look like a web designer’s hangover from 1998. The scowling photo of Sergey Mavrodi, the man behind MMM, looks like a mugshot. It could, in fact, be an actual mugshot — three seconds of Googling would reveal to any would-be investor that Mavrodi has been incarcerated in Russia for running a Ponzi scheme by the exact same name.

People are falling over themselves to sign up.

“It’s very easy. It’s very fun. It’s very stable pay,” says a man who says he is from Chiang Mai, Thailand, in a video posted to MMM Global’s Facebook page where he shows off his growing account balance on a tablet. “I have to say thank you for the founder, Sergey Mavrodi, and the moderators. Together, we change the world. Together, we change our lives.”

MMM participants pool their money, making it available to others who need to make withdrawals. The promise of doubling your money every month comes from using Bitcoin to purchase Mavros, a digital currency invented by Mavrodi whose value is re-calculated every two weeks by, you guessed it, Mavrodi. And the promise of spectacular returns on the value of Mavros appears to be a factor in the real-life surging value of Bitcoin, which has risen 58 per cent to US$388.49 since Oct. 9.

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Bitcoin analysts, traders and brokers are quick to point out that MMM Global is far from the only reason the digital currency has had a good month. More and more people are using it, institutional investors are pouring money into its underlying blockchain technology and the U.S. government just completed its final auction of Bitcoins seized during its investigation into the online black market Silk Road.

Still, the connection with MMM is not helping Bitcoin’s image.

“It’s not a good thing to have convicted criminal Ponzi schemers involved in this asset class,” said Brendan O’Connor, chief executive of Genesis Global Trading, which specializes in trading digital currencies. “I think that’s fairly obvious.”

It’s impossible to know exactly how many people are participating in MMM and how much of an effect they’re having on the value of Bitcoin. What is clear is that the program is growing particularly quickly in China, with a significant following in South Africa and India as well.

With the exception of the supposedly skyrocketing value of the Mavros, MMM is surprisingly frank about how it works. The website has a disclaimer that makes it clear the money is coming from other members, not any sort of business or investment activity, and that participants could lose it all at any time.

So why on earth would anyone sign up? One reason is the program’s populist appeal to people who are angry about income inequality and believe they’re being scammed by conventional banks. The site has an “ideology” section with a 3,700-word screed against capitalism and the global financial system: “You have spent all your life, working for billionaires, you have been taken away all your power, energy and health, you’ve been squeezed like a lemon, and after that you’ve been just thrown into the dustbin as a write-off.”

But the dream of a quasi-socialist utopia where everyone pools their resources and helps each other out isn’t the main attraction. Bobby Lee, chief executive of China-based BTCC, the world’s longest-running Bitcoin exchange, said the real allure is plain old greed.

“If someone convinces you that you can invest your money in this company or this fund and get 15 per cent per year, you might be tempted. If it’s 30 per cent per month, you might be even more tempted,” Lee said. “Unfortunately in the world, we don’t have everyone at the same education level or experience.”

BTCC’s Twitter account recently put out a warning about MMM and other questionable financial schemes targeting Bitcoin users. But for all the attention it’s getting, Lee said the program appears to be in its early stages and still isn’t particularly well-known in China.

Lee said people who hear about such schemes and let it affect their perception of Bitcoin are looking at things the wrong way. He said MMM is just a more technologically advanced version of something that’s been around for hundreds of years and says more about human nature than the stability of digital currency.

“When people go to a bank and use an ATM machine to withdraw cash, and they use that to buy drugs and they get arrested, does the bank CEO worry about that?” Lee said. “Like it or not, people choose to do illicit activities in society.”

Gil Luria, an analyst with Wedbush Securities who follows Bitcoin, said he believes the long term factors underpinning the value of Bitcoin are strong. Things like MMM are bound to produce short-term volatility of the sort investors are seeing now, he said – but the nature of the scheme means things will eventually return to normal.

“If this is indeed a pyramid scheme… it will collapse and people will lose their money. That’s going to be terrible, but it has nothing to do with how they move the money,” Luria said. “It will sort itself out.”